The first touch of his humour appears in the contrast of the gentle and lofty boredom of the letter with the torrents of love in the poem.

And if we may imagine that the lover is partly an image of what Browning once felt in a youthful love, we may also think that the making of the second and critical Pauline was his record, when his love had passed, of what he thought about it all.
This mode of treatment, so much more analytic than imaginative, belongs to Browning as an artist.

He seems, while he wrote, as if half of him sat apart from the personages he was making, contemplating them in his observant fashion, discussing them coolly in his mind while the other half of him wrote about them with emotion; placing them in different situations and imagining what they would then do; inventing trials for them and recombining, through these trials, the elements of their characters; arguing about and around them, till he sometimes loses the unity of their personality.

This is a weakness in his work when he has to create characters in a drama who may be said, like Shakespeare's, to have, once he has created them, a life of their own independent of the poet.

His spinning of his own thoughts about their characters makes us often realise, in his dramas, the individuality of Browning more than the individuality of the characters.